


Light on Light

by ProlixInSpace



Category: The Dragon Prince (Cartoon)
Genre: Breakfast, Cultural Traditions, Family, Fireworks, Gen, Magefam, Past, new year's
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28443858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ProlixInSpace/pseuds/ProlixInSpace
Summary: It's New Year's in Katolis, and Viren and his children have a special way of celebrating with everyone.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	Light on Light

**Author's Note:**

> If you're waiting on the next chapter of The Time that is Given Us, it'll be out later today I think! I just wanted to make sure I had this cute little family mini-fic out for the holiday.

**Light on Light**

The weather is brisk, to say the least. Even mid-day and afternoon began to freeze in earnest right around the night of the Cold Moon and now it’s unpleasant to be outdoors at any time of day. One is punished severely for forgetting one’s bed-warmer in the hours before retiring.

Not that Viren needs one tonight. When he looks up from his writing and realizes that midnight is already long past, he makes the decision not to bother going to bed at all. He stands at the East-facing window, despite the cold that radiates off the glass, and squints at the first hints of chambray on the horizon. Fainter stars are beginning to fade in anticipation of the most important morning of the year.

On any other night, he’d likely be one of very few stirring in the castle, mostly guards on night-watch, but tonight is special. There is a kind of shared held breath in the air. It isn’t uncommon to simply stay awake all night, in order to avoid any risk of missing this sunrise, and if he were to take a walk, he’d likely find other restless folk, especially other parents, staying up so they can wake their children when the time is right. 

Of course, it’s Viren they’ll all be depending on to start the festivities. He stretches, first in one direction, and then the other. 

It’s about time to get started, but he lingers next to the fire for a moment, unable to resist the warmth, before he descends into a workspace accessible to only two other people in the entire kingdom. (It isn’t as if what he does down here is a secret, per se, but he knows the nature of people, to be curious to the point of stupidity. This place is concealed more for their safety than anything else.)

First are the preparations for the event: a concoction of ingredients prepared in slim wooden cylinders, each with their own mechanism of action, to be triggered at exactly the right moment with a spell. 

After that, though, he begins his own  _ private _ preparations for the First Dawn.

Down here, it’s cold enough to keep everything preserved, from when he went to the kitchens the previous morning and brought it here to store. He surveys the components for a very special kind of magic: breakfast. He’s got three kinds of melons, several small oranges, a loaf of crusty brown bread, and a wheel of hard cheese with the kind of mild flavor that both Soren and Claudia prefer.

He’s only just started slicing into the larger melon when he hears the scraping rock-on-rock sound of the staircase descending. 

“Claudia?” He asks, recognizing her footsteps. “What are you doing up?”

“Weird dreams,” she says, voice thick with sleep. She steps up to the work table. “Can I help?”

She’ll turn thirteen this summer, and for the past six months it seems like every time Viren turns around, she’s grown another half-inch. The hem of the nightdress beneath the winter robe no longer comes anywhere near floor-length, well above her ankles, and her hair, tied back with a worn ribbon, is halfway down her back when he’d swear it was just recently brushing her shoulders.

Viren almost laughs at himself -- no better moment than this holiday to contemplate the passage of time, he supposes. 

“You can help by waking your brother,” Viren says without taking his eyes off the path of the knife through the fruit. “It’s almost time.”

“I tried,” answers Claudia. “He threatened to throw me off a parapet.”

“Ah,” Viren chuckles to himself. Claudia has little room to speak on this, in his opinion. Both she and Soren were fond of early mornings when they were younger, but he’s had to watch both of them, the moment they began to approach adolescence, morph inexorably into dyed-in-the-wool night owls. “In that case, why don’t you cut the fruit this time, while I wake him?”

She hesitates. “It’s better when you do it.”

“Consider it a challenge, then. I’ve already done this one. Mix them up after they’re cut, we’ll see if you can tell the difference when we get there.” He passes her the knife. “And--”

“Be careful. I know, dad.”

A hint of a smile comes to his face like air bubbles to the surface of a lake. He has to say it, given that she’s already sliced into her own fingers twice, once seriously enough to leave a lasting scar. She’s too confident with the knife now, and her attention lapses. 

Hard to fault her for it, when he knows where she gets it from. 

He leaves her to it, though, vanishing up the stairs and making his way to knock on Soren’s door. The Captain of the Guard is forever barging in at all hours to collect him for training, insisting it  _ builds character,  _ but Viren remembers being a fourteen-year-old boy and endeavors to give his son at least a little of the personal space he wishes  _ he’d _ had. 

“I told you to go away!” Soren groans, sounding like he’s got his head under a pillow rather than on top of it. 

Viren leans close to the door and clears his throat. 

“Oh,” Soren answers. “I thought it was Claudia again. Wait, she really told on me?  _ Ugh.  _ Fine, open it.”

Viren crosses the room in a couple of long steps and perches on the desk chair. “You know what day it is. Sunrise brings a new year.”

“Yeah, I know, I just don't care. I have to get up _ every _ morning to run laps, it’s a holiday, can’t I sleep in for once?”

“Yes, well, you won’t have to run laps at least,” Viren says.

“No, I’ll just have to go up a  _ million _ stairs, which is  _ soooo much better.”  _ If Soren rolled his eyes any harder, he’d injure himself. 

“I think you might appreciate that kind of exercise, one day.” Viren considers for a moment, and then says, “If you truly don’t want to join us, I won’t force you. Of course, you know how noisy it gets. I doubt even  _ you _ can sleep through that. As long as you’re going to be awake anyway, why not indulge your sister? You know how she feels about this.”

“Yeah, I just don’t know  _ why,”  _ grumbles Soren. “It’s just a day like any other day. Fine, I’ll meet you up there.”

“Thank you,” Viren is careful to say as he leaves. Positive reinforcement, and all that. 

He returns to the workspace to collect Claudia and the two baskets, and they begin the climb: the tallest tower in Katolis Castle. 

Ordinarily, the space at the top of the tower isn’t used for much, inhabited only by elite archers whose main function is more surveillance than combat. Today, though, Viren and his children will take over the balcony for a much-anticipated event. 

To watch the sunrise on the first day of the new year is a tradition going back hundreds of years -- this additional way of celebrating is only about a decade old, but that still means both of his children have no real memories of anything else. It’s gotten so popular so quickly, it feels like it’s been this way forever. 

Early light is beginning to seep into the sky properly when they arrive at the platform and begin the setup. Viren places the first few cylinders into a metal frame that he constructed with the help of a smith in town, and Claudia spreads a burgundy blanket on the ground, setting out the fruit and bread and cheese just as Soren arrives through the doorway. 

When Viren looks down over the railing, he can see people beginning to crowd into the upper and lower bailey. Harrow and his boys have their blanket in a prime position as usual, and townspeople congregate on the bridge to the castle. Every year seems like it brings out more people than the last. 

The moment comes to begin. 

He glances down at Soren and Claudia, still bleary-eyed but happily spearing chunks of melon with their forks and putting slices of bread on cheese. Being his children and assistants, they have the privilege of the best seat in the country to watch the show. 

Viren draws a pinch of ashes from a pouch at his hip and, with a quick incantation, the first two cylinders go flying, launched from the frame as if from a cannon. They soar high above the castle and the town, and each one, at its apogee, explodes into colorful, glittering sparks that streak through the early dawn. 

Between bites of a hastily-assembled sandwich, Soren helps load more cylinders into the frame -- three this time, and then four the next. The frame can hold as many as seven, though in the last few years, Soren’s been assisting more, and they’ve got a rhythm down where they can make it _ look _ like a lot more are launched at once. 

With the first few, it’s possible to hear the cheers from below, as the light from the fireworks competes with the light from the rising sun, but the  _ bang  _ and  _ pop  _ and  _ boom  _ of the explosions quickly drowns all that out. Claudia takes a turn launching them (her second year doing it, and he’s proud of how much smoother she is at it this time) so that Viren can quickly eat a few pieces of fruit.

Together, the three of them welcome the sun with the greatest fanfare, concluding in a finale that requires all three of them to work at once -- this is the first year they’ve managed to properly pull it off, and it is  _ spectacular.  _

Once the work is done, they linger on the platform as the wind disperses the smoke, finishing their breakfast in the peace of the morning. 

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Actually, this secretly loops back to a headcanon I have about the Orphan Queen being the child of a de-Arcanum'd and self-banished Aditi, and that being why Katolis' aesthetic shares a few things with the Sunfire elves. One of those things is the tradition of seeing the first sunrise of the year for luck. (Also a real-world tradition where I live, but who's counting?)
> 
> Happy New Year, TDP fandom!


End file.
